05 April 2013 7:09 PM

Labour's moral squalor

Does the Labour
Party really believe it was entirely righct and proper that Mick Philpott, who
has been jailed for life for the manslaughter of six children – five of them
his own -- should have been subsidised on welfare to the tune of upwards of
£60,000 per year? It certainly looks as if it does.

Labour’s Treasury
spokesman Ed Balls has been expressing his horror at the ‘divisive and cynical’
remarks made by the chancellor, George Osborne, who asked why taxpayers were
subsidising lifestyles such as Philpott’s. It would surely have been rather
more edifying had Balls expressed his horror instead at Philpott’s lifestyle.

For it was not just
that Philpott had caused the deaths of six children in the house fire he had plotted with his wife and a friend to frame Philpott’s mistress for arson and
gain a bigger house. It was that he used his women as milch cows, producing
children so that he could live off the welfare benefits they accrued, raking in
thousands of pounds per year in child benefit and working family tax credits as
well as the money his wife and mistress brought in from their work as cleaners.
The more children they produced for him, the more cash he trousered from them –
while all the time treating them abominably.

In other words, he
used his children’s very existence to gain money for his sexually depraved,
drug-fuelled, abusive lifestyle. And while of course other benefit claimants do
not deliberately torch their houses and kill their children, the fact remains
that unconditional welfare payments, in particular child benefit which is paid
on the birth of every child regardless of family circumstances, act as a direct
incentive for the mass fatherlessness and the consequent instrumentalisation
and gross neglect of children that now characterise welfare deserts up and down
the country where depravity, cruelty, neglect, sexual abuse and violence are
the norm.

Britain’s welfare
system, in other words, is inescapably implicated in creating lifestyles of
profound amorality and barbarism. It not only subsidises them, but actively creates
an attitude of mind which is deeply self-centred, regarding the world as owing
the claimant a living, sinking into patterns of indolence, hedonism and
squalor, and treating those who should be recipients of love and duty instead
as objects to be used for self-gratification and as whipping-boys when they
dare make any demands of their own. Worse still, it then perpetuates itself
down through the generations in inherited cycles of dysfunctionality, creating
a class apart which is simply separated from civilised society.

Those who claim
that such an analysis demonises the poor are themselves wholly complicit in
condoning and incentivising the neglect and victimisation of children, the
abandonment and abuse of women and the spreading of violence and hideous
selfishness in ever widening circles of demoralisation and dysfunctionality.

There are many
truly poor and disadvantaged people who, through no fault of their own, really
cannot escape their straitened circumstances but who nevertheless lead lives of
sobriety, orderliness and civilised values. It is hard to exaggerate the fury
felt by these people, who are forced to live on welfare benefits, at the way in
which people like Philpott not only shamelessly milk the system but are treated
as equally deserving as themselves.

But of course, to
the left the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is
itself evil and must never be drawn because it ‘demonises the disadvantaged’.
But drawing a distinction between good and bad behaviour and holding people
responsible for their actions is the essence of morality. If you insist on
non-judgmentally rewarding those who behave badly or antisocially, you actively
encourage that bad or antisocial behaviour – and thus you help make victims of
others.

Such non-judgmentalism
is therefore a profoundly amoral position. And that is the position taken by
the left. It not only negates personal responsibility but also free will -- which
is the essence of being human. Shedding crocodile tears for the poor, the left in fact treats them as sub-human – and in its own narcissistic moral blindness,
actively promotes both individual and social harm.

That is the true
evil of the left; and that is the revolting yoke which, by screaming at George
Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over Philpott and welfare reform rather than
crying out over the dead children and the lifestyle which created that horror, Balls
and Miliband have now hung round Labour’s neck.

The thinking underpinning welfare is morally degrading. Alas, it is supported by people from across the main political parties. It is not just Labour. The level of welfare that prevails coupled with mass immigration is lethal. I cannot visualise current politicians taking this head on unless there is an even deeper financial crisis.

I would also like to point out that, as a taxpayer, the Government should be obligated to make the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, purely for the reason that I should know exactly where my money is being spent.

We are all so privileged to live in this country as we do, but privileges all too quickly become entitlements, which is why Labour can now get away with calling these benefit reductions 'taxes.' To do this is as immoral as it is economically illiterate. We cannot let them get back in.

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